Marin carpool-lane cheaters continue to plague commute

Traffic crawls on southbound Highway 101 near the border of Novato and San Rafael, one of the worst morning commute areas in the region. Officials say carpool lane violators are exacerbating the problem. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

Regional transportation officials are trying to figure out a way to stamp out the rampant number of solo drivers who are in carpool lanes during commute hours in Marin and other Bay Area counties.

Part of what gums up traffic during the commute is the number of solo drivers in the designated high occupancy vehicle, or HOV, lanes, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

“It’s a concern to the commission and they have made it clear to us they want to address it in some form,” said Randy Rentschler, director of legislation and public affairs for the MTC. He said several meetings have occurred on the topic in recent months. “It not only slows traffic, it erodes the public’s confidence in carpool lanes.”

Rentschler said as it stands now, the carpool lanes operate on what basically is an “honor system.”

Commission figures show that 11 percent of people who use the carpool lanes during the evening commute on Highway 101 in Marin are solo drivers, while 14 percent of drivers using the southbound carpool lanes are alone.

Bay Area-wide, 24 percent of drivers are carpool lane violators in the morning, 19 percent in the evening. A recent California Highway Patrol survey estimated the number of violators in Marin at a more modest 3 to 4 percent.

Drivers caught violating the rules face fines and fees of more than $500. The CHP enforces for violations, but it’s one of a number of jobs its officers perform during the busy commute.

“We are looking for violators and when we are able to pull people over and issue a citation we will,” said Officer Andrew Barclay, spokesman for the CHP’s Marin office. “But that is all happening during our highest call volume time of day, the commute. There are crashes and other things that are going on then. We are aware of the problem and it’s across the Bay Area, not just Marin.”

The agency is hardly ignoring the issue. Statewide, the CHP issued 64,000 tickets for carpool-lane cheating in 2016, up from 39,600 in 2010.

But a problem remains. In addition to slowing down traffic for legitimate carpoolers, the solo drivers also get in the way of Golden Gate Transit buses.

“I was at the MTC talking about enforcement issues,” said Denis Mulligan, general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge district, which operates the commute bus system in Marin. “It is a challenge. There are lot of physical constraints that tie the CHP’s hands on enforcement. To do enforcement effectively you need to have a place to pull off. In some counties — and Marin is one of them — there is no place to pull off within the left shoulder, and to take people all the way across all the lanes at certain times of day is challenging.”

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Traffic experts say the solo drivers make bad traffic worse. The latest congestion findings — based on 2016 traffic counts — show the morning southbound Highway 101 commute from Rowland Boulevard in Novato to North San Pedro Road in San Rafael is 15th worst in the Bay Area. The ranking was based on traffic measured from 6:40 to 10:05 a.m. Last year it was 14th. While the segment dropped in rank, the traffic got worse.

In 2015, there were 3,350 hours lost in delay in the segment. In 2016, that figure jumped to 3,860 hours. The MTC defines congestion as traffic that moves slower than 35 mph for 15 minutes or longer. The 2014 count showed 2,930 hours were lost in the segment. Part of the issue is solo drivers in the HOV lanes, officials say.

Rentschler said the enforcement answer could be in technology, but that also has a downside.

“We’d like to rely more on technology to determine if people are cheating or not, but cameras make people nervous,” he said. “We are in a frustrating spot right now, we know we have problem, but we don’t have an easy answer.”